#Narcissimprobs

I, along with IU Bloomington’s other 40,000-plus students, received an email from the provost Monday evening.

She informed us campus will maintain normal operation for Jan. 27, but we should take precautions because of the expected bitterly cold weather. I was not surprised or angered by this message, as cold weather alone is usually not enough to warrant the closing of an entire campus.

But, upon opening my Twitter feed approximately 1 minute and 30 seconds after reading said message, I encountered tweet after tweet “criticizing” IU’s decision to keep campus open.

Why did I put “criticizing” in quotes? Because it wasn’t criticism. It was whining.
We live in the information generation, the era when virtually anything and everything we will ever want to know in a thousand lifetimes is available at our fingertips.

And it’s turning us into complaining narcissists.

We can learn about the Beat Generation of writers, the life of Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman or the very short history of The NeXT Computer with just a Google search.

Instead we choose — myself very much included — to Instagram a picture of our once-weekly healthy lunch or to tweet something vague and ambiguous directed at my cheating ex-boyfriend who doesn’t even follow me anymore.

The thing about social networks is that 99 percent of the people that follow you, or are friends with you, don’t care about 99 percent of the stuff you talk about on said social network.

We use social networks so much because it gives us the illusion of importance. The hope that we’ll get a couple favorites or likes or retweets to stroke our egos.

It makes us feel better about ourselves for one fleeting moment out of an otherwise monotonous and soul-sucking day, and it is too scintillating to pass up.

You see, social networks aren’t really about being “social.” Actually, they’re quite the opposite. They’re about the self. They don’t involve any kind of face-to-face social interaction. All they involve is a smartphone or a computer and our own agenda.

That agenda is usually self-centered.

It involves a complaint, something we think is funny or interesting, some inside joke involving a friend — usually meant as a bragging tool to imply to our followers that we have friends outside of the Internet — or a meaningless and unnecessary observation.

Very rarely is anything we share over a social network actually beneficial to the greater good. And in many cases, even if what we share may be constituted as beneficial, the reasoning for our sharing of it is self-absorbed.

An example would be a retweet from the Trevor Project to show how liberal and tolerant we are.

I realize this is a very cynical interpretation of social networking. It probably speaks to my own narcissism. Which is, in fact, a delicious irony that I am very much aware of.
Of course, calling this irony of myself “delicious” is even more narcissism on my part — thus beginning a vicious, never-ending cycle.

The writer carries with him or her an inherent narcissism. We’re all writers, but social networking brings the writers in us to the foreground in ways past generations never would have imagined.

In some ways, this is good. It’s good to have the ability to be creative and to instantly share it with others.

But, I think I speak for most of us when I say I don’t care that you’re having a “much-needed chill night in with Netflix.”

­— zipperr@indiana.edu.
Follow columnist Riley Zipper on Twitter
@rileyezipper.